Hazily, now

We spent the night thinking about ways to communicate in this fearsome city. We wondered why our voices couldn’t be heard even though we shouted daily to high heaven, deepest hell and every level in between. We hammered at the doors and used any tools that life offered us to carve words of hatred, ignorance and disillusionment in the stone walls. We tried ripping down the bill posters to see if they would reveal a secret beneath their torn edges, but all they hid were more posters and layers of hard, congealed glue.

Having resolved that the city wasn’t hiding anything except vast numbers of people - more people than our minds could ever comprehend, all closeted away in their individual plasterboard boxes where they could endlessly muse over the lives of their favourite celebrities - we spent the rest of the night carousing under the moonlight, listening to the siren songs of the burglar alarms and smashing the empty wine bottles. We only ceased when dawn broke over the TV aerials.

At least, that’s how I remember it. You tell it differently, but then you were always the poetic one, weren’t you?